I haven't received such a message, but from what you folks describe, it certainly sounds like spam. If it were someone we knew--well, it would be like vermaden sending me a message with his atheist slogan in the sig, and mean nothing.

Heatherval, if you get a private message from these forums, from someone you don't know, and it bothers you at all, send it on to the moderators. Better too careful than not careful enough these days.

(Which reminds me of some satire I saw somewhere, where the story is that the teenage girl goes to meet someone who is also supposedly a teenage girl but turns out to be a rabid grizzly bear. The moral was something like, "Who knew bears could type?"

User James, if you're not a spammer, I think you'd best post an expanation VERY quickly.

The list of "Currently active members" at the bottom of the main page still lists this particular account name in blue. Can this be removed, or do we point unruly members to this unfortunate fate stating, "This is where we keep the bodies..."

Not to be a conspiracy nut, but do you think that there is any relation between this particular account's start date, & the apparent return of a particular wayward Admin at another well-known site?

...but from what I understand (for I haven't received any unsolicited private messages yet...), this is happening through private messages.

Are you advocating that the Admins/Moderators monitor private messages? I don't suspect you will get a lot of support for that level of policing. Even if a "waiting period" were enforced, spammers would simply wait for the probationary period to pass before beginning their nefarious activities.

Yes I understand it is a private message.

I was just saying that a user can't do anything for a period of time, including PM.

Oh, I've seen a mod on other vbulletin sites where there is a report button on PM... maybe it can be look into instead of monitoring private messages...

I used to be an active moderator at a very large vbb forum for digital video. It's a forum with about 140,000 members, 3 admins, and about 40-50 moderators.

That forum has an extremely strict rules set. It also has a customized vbb to enable an official warnings from moderators -- and a system to automatically suspend users who receive 3 warnings within a 30-day period. In addition, there's a five-day waiting period before new users can post. That structure was put in place to promote searching for answers and reading FAQs and HowTos, and for that ... it works well. But it doesn't prevent spam. Spam is an ongoing, never ending problem.

Here's a link to their rules and the "three strikes" system, just to give you a feel for how strict some can be. Note: that forum began in October 2001 with no rules at all. Each and every rule, and system of control, was put in place due to horrid problems. I recall the initial implementation of the waiting period. Oh-my. 3 days wasn't enough to stop the people who'd never heard of Google or couldn't find the search button. We had to move it to 5 days.

Would a captcha-like mechanism for the first 5 posts or so be possible? A spammer would have to really spend some time manually 'getting into the system' that way before being able to spam to the user base. Not sure if it's possible but would certainly be an effective tool, IMHO... of course, after a certain # of posts that would not be required (given as 5 in the above example.)

That forum has an extremely strict rules set. It also has a customized vbb to enable an official warnings from moderators -- and a system to automatically suspend users who receive 3 warnings within a 30-day period. In addition, there's a five-day waiting period before new users can post. That structure was put in place to promote searching for answers and reading FAQs and HowTos, and for that ... it works well. But it doesn't prevent spam. Spam is an ongoing, never ending problem.

Yes, we have access to a warning system that suspends users after so many warnings. As a matter of fact, jggimi, there is a little red button at the right of your post that I can press and you get a warning. Then I just have to go to the admin panel and decide how many warnings I want to give before you are history.

However, that is not the point. We do not want to have an extremely strict rule policy on these forums. We (Admins + moderators) do not want to be baby sitters in the sense that we do not want to put up barbed wire, machine guns, rabid dogs, and trolls to keep you from doing bad things. We would like the users to just use (in)common sense. If there is a user who is incapable of using common sense, we will gladly get rid of him.

When DaemonForums active membership becomes 140,000 people, we might then have to use very strict rules, but for now we are doing all right.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sunnz

I think it would be good is new members need to be moderated before they can post... like give them a one day wait before they can post.

As Carpetsmoker said, we are considering this.

Here is the bad thing about requiring a wait period before the first post:
It does not necessarily do anything whatsoever to stop spam. It does increase the chance that a new *BSD user will look into documentation before posting, but we must remember that this forum does not exist without inexperienced users. If we were all *BSD gurus there would be no reason for us to be be staring at one another over expensive vBulletin software.

Moderating the first post certainly would help the spam problem, but it is not a fix-all solution, and here is a problem with this method:
It is very easy for the comfortable, long standing members of the forum to have absolutely no qualms with the first post moderation method, but what about new users (a.k.a the life blood of these forums)? This means that we are requiring a new user, who has *BSD half installed on his shiny new laptop to wait until a moderator gets on and has the time to clear his first post before he can figure out why he can not get *BSD installed correctly. In the mean time, he has his new laptop plugged into the wall, with all of its fans blasting at 100% (No drivers installed). Sorry, but that can dampen someone's outlook on *BSD and is not particularly likely to increase *BSD use. Trust me... It happens.

However, I do like the first post moderation more than I do the waiting period. As long as we have active moderators (The whole reason DaemonForums exists), the new user should not have to wait long. We will wait and see how things play out a while longer. It is sad that we all ready have our first spammer, but it is far from a tidal wave of spam that calls for drastic measures. Remember, active moderators and administrators means things can change when needed. Everything does not have to be set into stone right away.